[KarmaKiller]

Quote:

The Pirate Bay intends to pay users for letting their computers host content as part of a worldwide peer-to-peer network.

That's the plan of Global Gaming Factory, the company which intends to acquire the notorious website and legitimise its business.

"To compete with free file-sharing, you have to beat it," said CEO of GGF Hans Pandeya, speaking to the LA Times. "What's better than zero? Well, that's paying somebody USD 1."

The peer-to-peer network intends to transmit data for internet service providers such as AT&T and Comcast, reducing the bandwidth of ISPs struggling to cope with increased traffic, much of it due to piracy.

GGF has acquired peer-to-peer firm Peerialism for its technology, and users could spend money from aiding the company on content such as games, music, movies and other media.

"We're a publicly listed company, so whatever we take over has to be legal," added Pandeya. "To be legal, you have to have content providers who are paid. That's what we want."

Although The Pirate Bay has an estimated 20 million users, it will be a hard sell convincing them to pay for content even if it's subsidised by working with GGF.

But the owners of The Pirate Bay see the acquisition as the next step in the evolution of the website

"We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die," said The Pirate Bay.

"If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it.

"That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And you can now not only share files but share with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now."

The acquisition of The Pirate Bay is expected to complete in August.

Source

And now I'm even more confused. How the hell is that going to work? Seems to me if you were seeding, your taking the risk of being prosecuted even more. Not to mention, won't ISP's have a hissy fit if your uploading/downloading constantly?

Edit:
This helps some I guess

Quote:

To clarify a bit..

TPB has been owned by a company for the last years since the raid so nothing there will really change except the names of the owners. The talk about TPB are going to be a pay site is wrong, the CEO that said that does not know what he is talking about.

Now, the BIG change is that the tracker is going to be outsourced to a new formed company that wont know what they track, just that they connect peers, and the torrent listings will be handed by an other new company that will have torrents but they will not know either content or who is using the torrents. This setup will be practically impossible to take down or find anyone liable to sue.

The 3d party company services will have APIs, so you can on your blog or whatever have your own small torrent listings just as you now pull in twitter feeds. remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block it as ppl just used another side that pulled in the feeds and read it there instead? well that goes for torrents and TPB to.

All in all, this is not the end of the world as some are seeing it but a rather interesting technical improvement.

And dont worry, not a dime will go to the media industries spectrial prize money what i know of but a really nice fund for doing cool stuff.

/krs - co.founder of TPB and PB, not involved in TPB anymore and have no stake in any cash.